I can see why you might feel that way, if this was just a technical flaw in CEV that can be fixed with a simple patch. But I've been having a growing suspicion that the main philosophical underpinning of CEV, namely preference utilitarianism, is seriously wrong, and this story was meant to offer more evidence in that vein.

The problem is using actions to infer terminal values. In order to determine your terminal values, you have to think about them; reflect on them. Probably a lot. So in order for the actions of a person to be a reliable indicator of her terminal values, she must have done some reflecting on what she actually values. For most people, this hasn't happened.

I disagree. People who believe they have thought about their terminal values are often the most confused about what they actually value. Human values as judged by observing how people act rather than by what they claim to think are more self-consistent and more universal than the values professed by people who think they have discovered their own terminal values through reflection. Your conscious beliefs are but a distorted echo of the real values embodied in your brain.

I suppose I might count as someone who favors "organismal" preferences over confusing the metaphorical "preferences" of our genes with those of the individual. I think your argument against this is pretty weak.

You claim that favoring the "organismal" over the "evolutionary" fails to accurately identify our values in four cases, but I fail to see any problem with these cases.

• I find no problem with upholding the human preference for foods which taste fatty, sugary and salty. (Note that consistently applied, the "organismal" preference would be for the fatty, sugary and salty taste and not foods that are actually fatty, sugary and salty. E.g. We like drinking diet Pepsi with Splenda almost as much as Pepsi and in a way roughly proportional to the success with which Splenda mimics the taste of sugar. We could even go one step further and drop the actual food part, valuing just the experience of [seemingly] eating fatty, sugary and salty foods.) This doesn't necessarily commit me to valuing an unhealthy diet all things considered because we also have many other preferences, e.g. for our health, which may outweigh this true human value.
• The next two cases (fear of snakes and enjoying violence) can be dealt with similarly.
• The last one is a little trickier but I think it can be addressed by a similar principle in which one value gets outweighed by a different value. In this case, it would be some higher-order value such as treating like cases alike. The difference here is that rather than being a competing value that outweighs the initial value, it is more like a constitutive value which nullifies the initial value. (Technically, I would prefer to talk here of principles which govern our values rather than necessarily higher order values.)

I thought your arguments throughout this post were similarly shallow and uncharitable to the side you were arguing against. For instance, you go on at length about how disagreements about value are present and intuitions are not consistent across cultures and history, but I don't see how this is supposed to be any more convincing than talking about how many people in history have believed the earth is flat.

Okay, you've defeated the view that ethics is about the values all humans throughout history unanimously agree on. Now what about views that extrapolate not from perfectly consistent, unanimous and foundational intuitions or preferences, but from dynamics in human psychology that tend to shape initially inconsistent and incoherent intuitions to be more consistent and coherent -- dynamics, the end result of which can be hard to predict when iteratively applied and which can be misapplied in any given instance in a way analogous to applications of the dynamic over beliefs of favoring the simplest hypothesis consistent with the evidence.

By the way, I don't mean to claim that your conclusion is obviously wrong. I think someone favoring my type of view about ethics has a heavy burden of proof that you hint at, perhaps even one that has been underappreciated here. I just don't think your arguments here provide any support for your conclusion.

It seems to me that when you try to provide illustrative examples of how opposing views fail, you end up merely attacking straw men. Perhaps you'd do better if you tried to establish that any opposing views must have some property in common and that such a property dooms those views to failure. Or that opposing views must go one of two mutually exclusive and exhaustive routes in response to some central dilemma and both routes doom them to failure.

I really would like to see the most precise and cogent version of your argument here as I think it could prompt some important progress in filling in the gaps present in the sort of ethical view I favor.

Hi.

I've read nearly everything on less wrong but except for a couple months last summer, I generally don't comment because a) I feel I don't have time, b) my perfectionist standards make me anxious about meeting and maintaining the high standards of discussion here and c) very often someone has either already said what I would have wanted to say or I anticipate from experience that someone will very soon.

There's the consequentialist/utilitarian click, and the intelligence explosion click, and the life-is-good/death-is-bad click, and the cryonics click.

I can find a number of blog posts from you clearly laying out the arguments in favor of each of those clicks except the consequentialism/utilitarianism one.

What do you mean by "consequentialism" and "utilitarianism" and why do you think they are not just right but obviously right?

Big Edit: Jack formulated my ideas better, so see his comment.
This was the original: The fact that the universe hasn't been noticeably paperclipped has got to be evidence for a) the unlikelihood of superintelligences, b) quantum immortality, c) our universe being the result of a non-obvious paperclipping (the theists were right after all, and the fine-tuned universe argument is valid), d) the non-existence of intelligent aliens, or e) that superintelligences tend not to optimize things that are astronomically visible (related to c). Which of these scenarios is most likely? Related question: If we built a superintelligence without worrying about friendliness or morality at all, what kind of things would it optimize? Can we even make a guess? Would it be satisfied to be a dormant Laplace's Demon?

They all sound true to me.

Correct. I'm a moral cognitivist; "should" statements have truth-conditions. It's just that very few possible minds care whether should-statements are true or not; most possible minds care about whether alien statements (like "leads-to-maximum-paperclips") are true or not. They would agree with us on what should be done; they just wouldn't care, because they aren't built to do what they should. They would similarly agree with us that their morals are pointless, but would be concerned with whether their morals are justified-by-paperclip-production, not whether their morals are pointless. And under ordinary circumstances, of course, they would never formulate - let alone bother to compute - the function we name "should" (or the closely related functions "justifiable" or "arbitrary").

You do agree that you and Greene are actually saying the same thing, yes?

I don't think we anticipate different experimental results. We do, however, seem to think that people should do different things.

Correct. I'm a moral cognitivist; "should" statements have truth-conditions. It's just that very few possible minds care whether should-statements are true or not; most possible minds care about whether alien statements (like "leads-to-maximum-paperclips") are true or not. They would agree with us on what should be done; they just wouldn't care, because they aren't built to do what they should. They would similarly agree with us that their morals are pointless, but would be concerned with whether their morals are justified-by-paperclip-production, not whether their morals are pointless. And under ordinary circumstances, of course, they would never formulate - let alone bother to compute - the function we name "should" (or the closely related functions "justifiable" or "arbitrary").